Session Three:
Title: Architecture and Built Environments
Date, Time & Location: April 10, 2015
12 – 2 pm Room 108, Whitney Humanities Center
2:30 – 4 pm Rooms 38-39, Beinecke Library
Session Leader: Tamara Sears
Panelists: Crispin Branfoot (SOAS), Rebecca Brown (Johns Hopkins University), Ajay Sinha (Mt. Holyoke College)

Crispin Branfoot is Senior Lecturer in South Asian Art and Archaeology at SOAS in the University of London. He is a member of the Centre of Jaina Studies, the SOAS South Asia Institute, the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme. He studied Ancient History and Archaeology at Manchester University (BA), and Art & Archaeology at SOAS (MA, PhD). He has worked in the Departments of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum in London. From 2000 to 2005 he was Senior Research Fellow in South Asian Art and Architecture at De Montfort University in Leicester (2000-5). Before joining SOAS in 2006 he taught South Asian art at De Montfort University, the University of Oxford, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Sothebys Institute. He is an Associate Editor for the journal South Asian Studies, one of the two academic journals of the British Association for South Asian Studies. His publications include Gods on the Move: Architecture and Ritual in the South Indian TempleLondon: British Academy & Society for South Asian Studies (2007). With Roger Taylor he published (2014) Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852-1860Washington: National Gallery of Art and Prestel Publishing )2014). With Ruth Barnes he has edited (2006) Pilgrimage: The Sacred JourneyOxford: Ashmolean Museum.

Rebecca M. Brown is a scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian art and visual culture at Johns Hopkins University. She has served as a consultant and a curator for modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. She chairs the Advanced Academic Program in Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins. Her courses are often cross-listed with Political Science, East Asian Studies, Museums and Society, and Women, Gender and Sexuality. She has led seminars in History of Art and Museum Studies at Georgetown and George Washington. She lectures widely, at venues from the Art Seminar Group of Baltimore to the National Museum of Korea. Her publications include Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection (exhibition and catalog, 2011),Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (Routledge 2010), Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Duke University Press 2009), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Wiley-Blackwell 2011), Asian Art(coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Blackwell 2006), and articles in Visual AnthropologyRes, Interventions, CSSAAME, Archives of Asian Art, Art Journal, Journal of Urban History, Screen, and Journal of Asian Studies.

Ajay Sinha is Professor of Art at Mt. Holyoke College, specializing in Indian and Asian art and Indian cinema. He is the author of Imagining Architects: Creativity in the Religious Monuments of India(University of Delaware Press, 2000), and editor, along with Raminder Kaur, of Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London, Sage Publications, 2005). His research has focused on ancient stone temples in the state of Karnataka in the southwest of India and modern Indian visual culture. Sinha has traveled on research grants to various parts of India and England. His current research project focuses on the visual culture of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the cultural value of oil painting in it.